Matthew Marcellus
Below 4.5
Raheem watched his phone as the number fell, 4.67 to 4.63, and felt them land before the digits did. He’d written another number on a scrap of paper and taped it to the dash: 4.5. The number below which the app would deactivate his account. Below which he’d have no income, no way to make rent, no legal employment options while his status remained “under review.”
Somewhere in the algorithm, a businessman in a Brooks Brothers suit had just destroyed him with three stars and a complaint Raheem couldn’t even see.
The businessman had cracked his window almost immediately. Raheem remembered the sound, the specific pitch of air screaming through a gap at seventy miles per hour. The car had been warm. No music playing. Raheem made a mental note as he always did, a habit from interpreting, when a missed detail meant someone died, and he filed it away. Window down before they cleared the airport loop.
Whatever the man was getting away from, it was in the car before Raheem said a word. He’d taken the route that shaved minutes off the app’s estimate because he knew the tunnel would be backed up.
Raheem’s English was flawless. Eight years of translating for Marines in Helmand had scrubbed away any trace of Pashto. The Americans always joked that he sounded like NPR. Back then, his accent had kept them alive. Now it couldn’t save his app rating. Three stars. Vehicle cleanliness issue flagged.
Raheem pulled up the ride details. Pickup: BWI Terminal. Dropoff: Roland Park. The businessman had tipped well, six dollars on a thirty-dollar fare, but the rating stayed low, and the complaint had appeared in the feedback.
Week three without SNAP benefits. The Big Beautiful Bill had tightened eligibility, and the state had flagged his case during recertification. He’d heard terms like fraud, waste, and abuse, but those were for scammers and cheats. Hell, he’d fought and bled for that visa. It made him a green-card holder, and green-card holders were still eligible, weren’t they? The caseworker said only that the new guidance was unclear and his file was under review. The review had no timeline.
Rice twice daily, and maybe lentils. In the morning, black coffee. Whatever spice he could scrounge up was a bonus. The metallic taste in his mouth had become constant three days ago.
His roommate, Kevin, worked nights at the port and slept days. They’d divided the apartment with a tension rod and a bedsheet. Raheem heard him snoring through the fabric at six AM, home from his shift, oblivious.
The kitchen was shared between them. Raheem’s shelf held rice, lentils, chicken bouillon, and a jar of instant coffee. Kevin’s held canned chili and a six-pack of Miller Lite that never lasted too long. A small refrigerator meant for a college freshman’s dorm sat dented, humming in the corner. They’d met through a Craigslist ad, both willing to accept anything. Since then, they’d never shared a meal. They never would.
Raheem counted his remaining rice. Four days, maybe five. He filled a pot with water and waited for it to boil.
That night, he checked his account balance and accepted the next ping. Johns Hopkins Hospital, night shift ending. He put the car in drive and pulled onto the empty street. The nurse wore scrubs with cartoon characters and smelled like hospital soap. She dropped into the backseat and asked if he could take Hanover Street instead of the highway. Raheem said yes and drove south toward Curtis Bay.
She didn’t crack the window. At the dropoff, she handed him five dollars cash on an eight-dollar fare and thanked him by name. The rating came through at the next red light: five stars.
He checked her rider profile: Dana M., joined 2019, 4.95 average rating. Nurse, probably. Maybe coming off a double shift at Hopkins.
She’d looked exhausted. Snoopy or Charlie Brown, he couldn’t remember which. The kind nurses wore in pediatrics to make kids feel safe. She’d asked about his night before requesting the route change, and waited patiently for his answer.
Raheem added to his notes. “Curtis Bay passengers treat drivers like humans. Wealthy passengers treat drivers like algorithms.”
Then he deleted it.
Obvious things didn’t need to be written down.
He added: Hopkins pickup, Curtis Bay dropoff. Window closed. Cash tip. He started tracking rides and customers. Just simple observations in his notes app. He tracked pickup locations, how passengers acted, whether they opened windows, and what they rated him. Over the next week, he began to see patterns in the notes.
Neighborhoods like Roland Park, Otterbein, Guilford, and Bolton Hill all gave him trouble, but, of course, these were the neighborhoods the city funneled money into for projects that seemed to drag on for years. They got used to being catered to. Businessmen cracked windows while women in wool coats fastened by horn toggles flagged cleanliness concerns he just couldn’t identify. His ratings from those areas hovered around four stars, sometimes lower. The tips were still there, even if they felt like charity, but the feedback, both said and unsaid, stung him.
Curtis Bay, Highlandtown, the blocks east of Patterson Park, and other working neighborhoods rated him well. Nurses, casino workers, and people coming off labor shifts. Nobody opened windows. The tips were smaller, but the ratings stayed high, mostly fives, some fours.
By the end of the week, he’d logged forty-seven rides. The pattern held. Wealthy passengers found something wrong with his car. Working passengers didn’t. He checked rider forums online. Drivers in the same neighborhoods posted their own rating patterns. The complaints he was getting—window cracking, cleanliness flags—didn’t show up in their threads. Same routes and hours, different drivers with clean records. The problem was specific. The problem was him.
His rating dropped to 4.54. The app sent a notification with a yellow exclamation point. Performance below standards, deactivation possible.
“Do better,” Raheem muttered back at the prompt.
He designed an experiment. Thursday, fourteen hours east of the harbor. Dundalk, Brooklyn, the neighborhoods where rowhouses pressed close, and the median income stayed below forty thousand.
He picked up home health aides and third-shift workers who hid faint smiles of relief and gratitude. A woman who cleaned offices downtown and told him about her daughter’s college applications to Morgan State and UMBC, unable to hide her pride. Nobody cracked windows. Nobody sniffed conspicuously. His rating climbed from 4.54 to 4.68 by midnight, then 4.76 by morning.
Friday, Roland Park and Guilford exclusively. Sixteen rides. Consultants, lawyers, and a man on a conference call the entire ride. Thirteen passengers cracked windows. His rating dropped to 4.55 by the end of the shift.
He made two hundred and eighty-seven dollars after gas.
Wealthy passengers weren’t harsh raters in general.
Raheem sat in the parking lot at Cylburn Arboretum and studied his notes. Eighty-six rides across two weeks. The correlation held at every income level he tested. Above a certain threshold, windows cracked. Below it, the windows stayed closed.
He was missing something. The businessman had reached for the window before Raheem said a word, before the temperature changed, before anything in the ride could explain it. Whatever it was, it was already in the car when the man got in, soaking into the cloth, saturating the air. Only some passengers reacted to it.
His phone showed 4.52. Two hundredths of a point above deactivation.
Morrison had shown up on Wednesday afternoon. Unannounced. Raheem was in the car between rides when the text came through.
“In town. Coffee?”
They met at the diner on Greenmount. Morrison looked good. Pressed khakis, a polo shirt with a defense contractor logo. He’d put on weight. The good kind, muscle from a gym membership and regular meals.
“Brother.” Morrison stood, reached for a hug.
Raheem moved into it automatically. Morrison’s grip was firm, quick. Then Morrison pulled back and held him at arm’s length, reading him.
“You doing okay?”
“Fine. Busy.” Raheem slid into the booth.
Morrison ordered coffee with milk and a cheeseburger, rare as it would come. Raheem asked for water, no lemon. The waitress lingered, expectant with a strained smile, but Raheem waved her off. Morrison watched it.
“Not eating?”
“Already ate.”
Morrison opened his mouth, let out a small sigh, and closed it. They talked about nothing important. Virginia weather, the Ravens, Morrison’s kids, and a Marine buddy who’d gotten promoted. But Morrison kept glancing at him, the way a squad leader checks troops who might have drunk just a little too much the night before, knowing they were hiding it. When Morrison’s burger arrived, he pushed it toward the center of the table.
“I’m not that hungry. Help me out?”
Raheem could smell the grease and the char.
“I’m good.”
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“This morning.”
“What’d you have?”
Raheem met his eyes. Morrison had pulled him out of an ambush in Sangin. Had vouched for him through three levels of bureaucracy to get him stateside. Took over two years. Raheem owed him truth or silence.
“Rice,” Raheem said without breaking eye contact.
Morrison sat back. The booth creaked.
“And before that?”
“Rice.”
“Jesus, Raheem…”
“The benefit situation changed. I’m handling it.”
“By starving?”
“By working. I’ve got rides to do.” Raheem stood. Morrison grabbed his wrist. “You smell different, brother.”
Raheem pretended not to hear him.
“Thin. Chemical-like. Almost like you’ve been running hard without a chance to rest.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me. That smell? That’s the barracks in Marjah when the supply trucks didn’t come for three weeks. That’s what dying smells like, brother. Slow dying.”
Morrison stopped. His hand released. “Let me help.”
“You already did. You got me here. I’m making it work.”
Raheem left cash on the table, his last ten-dollar bill, and walked out.
In the car, he opened his notes app and added: “Morrison detected it. Couldn’t name it but knew something was wrong.”
His phone buzzed with a text from Morrison: “Call me when you’re ready to talk.” He read it twice. His thumb hovered over the call button. Morrison couldn’t help. Morrison helping would mean Morrison knowing, and Morrison knowing would mean Raheem had failed the only American who’d ever treated him like a brother.
He deleted it and accepted the next ride.
Raheem tested the timing of it all. On Friday morning, he bought a rotisserie chicken from the discount grocery. Seven dollars. He ate a quarter of it in the parking lot. The skin crackled between his teeth. Salt and grease flooded his mouth, and all the while, his hands shook harder. Now they shook from relief, the body’s animal recognition that fuel had arrived. He ate too fast, and his stomach cramped, and he didn’t care. He savored the memory of the meal for two hours before driving to Roland Park.
Six rides. Five windows cracked. Eating bought him hours, not a day. The smell came back by the fifth or sixth hour, whenever his stomach finished and the body went back to burning itself. He didn’t have six hours to sit around.
The chicken had cost him half a day’s earnings.
He tried the opposite. If eating only delayed it, maybe going all the way under would level it off, his body settling into the burn until the smell stopped registering. A guess. He had nothing but guesses left. He went thirty-six hours on water alone, then worked Guilford on Sunday evening.
The first passenger cracked the window in less than fifteen seconds. The second coughed and asked if something was wrong with the car. There wasn’t. The third filed a complaint with the company about some chemical odor and an ambiguous mechanical issue.
Thirty-six hours in, it hadn't leveled. It was sharper now, thinner. He'd guessed wrong. His rating dropped to 4.51. The app sent another warning. He had forty-seven dollars in his account. Rent due in four days.
Raheem parked outside a closed gas station at three in the morning. He reached for his laptop and stopped.
He didn’t need a search engine. He needed to listen to what Morrison said. That’s what dying smells like, brother. Slow dying.
Raheem lifted the collar of his shirt to his nose. He inhaled deep, past the cheap detergent, past the lingering scent of the last passenger’s perfume.
There it was.
It wasn’t a chemical smell at all. It was sharp and acrid, a stinging scent like overripe apples or nail polish remover.
He closed his eyes, and the gas station dissolved. He was back at the entry control point in Helmand, standing next to a line of locals waiting for humanitarian rations. He remembered the way a fresh-faced Marine from Knockemstiff, Ohio, stepped back when he approached the line, wrinkling his nose, while another from somewhere in the far north of New York held his breath. They had called it “the haji smell.” They thought it was just poor hygiene. It wasn’t hygiene.
Raheem remembered a Navy corpsman explaining it to him while they shared a cigarette. It’s ketosis, Raheem. When the tank runs dry, the body starts stripping the copper wiring. It burns fat. It burns muscle. The exhaust comes out in your breath and sweat. Smells like acetone.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling slightly.
The biology was simple. He was starving. His body was eating itself to keep the engine running, and he was venting acetone into the enclosed cabin of a Toyota Camry. The passengers from Roland Park didn’t have a name for it. They’d never missed a meal that wasn’t a choice or part of some fasting routine. To their lizard brains, the smell didn’t register as hunger. It registered as a signal. It was sickness and a contaminant. To them, it was a threat.
But the nurses in Curtis Bay? The warehouse workers in Dundalk?
They didn’t crack the windows because they didn’t smell it. You don’t smell the air in your own house.
*
Raheem pulled up his bank statement on his phone. Six weeks since his last SNAP deposit, three of them sustained by rice and black coffee.
Covering it didn’t work. He’d tried. Air fresheners only stacked a second smell on the first, and the businessmen flagged both. He needed the acetone gone, not buried underneath a swinging Black Ice Little Trees air freshener.
The word he needed turned out to be counteractant, a chemical that paired with the odor molecule itself and dropped what the nose pulled in. Janitorial suppliers sold it by the gallon for locker rooms and bathrooms, anywhere a smell couldn’t be allowed to exist. Pine and eucalyptus oils, mostly. He didn’t understand the chemistry and didn’t need to. He needed to know it could be bought, and the dilution where it stopped working.
The key was ratio and delivery. Too much, and passengers would notice the artificial smell. Too little, and the ketones would break through. He needed sustained low-level exposure. Tuesday morning, he drove to an industrial supply warehouse on Ritchie Highway. Commercial odor counteractant concentrates for HVAC systems. The label listed pine oil and eucalyptol at a forty percent concentration. Twenty-eight dollars for a gallon jug. He bought it with money budgeted for rice.
His hands shook while measuring the concentrated liquid. One part to eighty parts distilled water. They didn’t shake from the fumes or even the stress. They shook from three weeks of rice and black coffee. From being two days from eviction. From the backward and insane hope that pine oil and chemistry might let him keep breathing.
He sprayed the dashboard and waited. The smell was faint. Industrial cleaner diluted to near-nothing. To him, it was invisible. His olfactory system had given up after the first hour.
*
The lawyer climbed into the backseat at 7:23 AM, with his tailored suit and his phone already out before he made his way fully inside. Raheem pulled into traffic and waited for the window to crack.
It didn’t.
The man’s fingers moved across his screen. No pause. No hesitation. No subtle shift away from the driver’s seat. At the dropoff, he said thank you, and the door closed normally, as if Raheem were just another human providing a service.
The five-star rating appeared an hour later. Raheem pulled into a Royal Farms lot and let himself shake.
Raheem worked wealthy neighborhoods for the next seven days. He resprayed the filter every morning, a light mist on the upholstery twice per shift. His rating climbed from 4.51 to 4.56 by day two. To 4.68 by day five. By the end of week one: 4.79.
No windows cracked. No cleanliness complaints. It held the acetone under the line where passengers started reaching for windows.
Week two, he accepted wealthy rides exclusively. Roland Park, Guilford, and the Bolton Hill corridor. His rating hit 4.85, then 4.91 by Sunday.
On Wednesday afternoon, a passenger sneezed four times in the backseat. A woman in Guilford asked if he’d recently detailed the car.
“Something smells chemical,” she said.
Thursday, a man with asthma cracked the window halfway through the ride. He didn’t say why, but his breathing had gotten labored.
Raheem diluted the mixture further. One to one hundred. The smell became fainter. A lawyer mentioned he liked the clean smell, absentmindedly running his fingers over the leather door handle. The ratings held, but every morning, Raheem had to respray earlier, the effectiveness window shrinking. He was going nose-blind to it faster every day, the same reason he couldn’t smell his own car. He’d need a stronger concentration or different compounds soon.
He made over a thousand dollars. He paid his rent and bought chicken, vegetables, and bread. He ate until the metallic taste faded. He slept for twelve hours and woke up without the exhaustion that had become baseline.
Week three, Tuesday morning. His rating sat at 4.93. He worked a full shift in wealthy neighborhoods. Nine rides, three hundred and forty dollars after gas. His checking account showed the highest balance since his SNAP benefits had been cut.
*
Tuesday afternoon, Raheem sat in a coffee shop on Charles Street and checked the news on his phone. The headline appeared at three forty-seven: “Domino Sugar Baltimore Plant Announces Closure. 800 Jobs Eliminated Effective March.”
The refinery had operated on the Inner Harbor since 1922. It was one of Baltimore’s last industrial employers paying above-median wages. Other headlines followed: “Government Shutdown Enters Fourth Week,” “Manufacturing Output Falls to Five-Year Low, Triggering Layoffs Nationwide.”
He scrolled through his ride queue. Seven requests pending, all from wealthy neighborhoods. His rating held at 4.93. He accepted the first ride.
Wednesday, the numbers accumulated. Sugar refinery: eight hundred jobs. Tech sector: fifty thousand nationally, twelve hundred in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Government contractors furloughed indefinitely. The regional unemployment estimate jumped from four percent to eleven percent.
Raheem worked a full shift. Twelve rides, all in Roland Park and Guilford. Nobody cracked a window. His rating climbed to 4.95.
Thursday morning, he studied the pattern. Wealthy passengers were still rating him highly. The riders had started to change.
The consultant who took a call during the ride mentioned hiring freezes. The attorney heading to her office had dark circles under her eyes. A man with a Von Baer leather briefcase asked to be dropped off at a job placement center instead of his original destination.
His rating hit 4.96 Thursday evening, then 4.98 by Friday morning. Friday night, Raheem diluted more counteractant mixture out of habit. He sprayed the cabin filter, let it dry, and reinstalled it. But the passengers had changed.
*
Saturday morning, Raheem accepted a ping from a business district address. The passenger stood outside a glass office tower holding a cardboard box. Brooks Brothers suit, good tie, leather shoes that looked recently polished, and silver cufflinks set with sapphires, the kind Raheem had only seen in catalogs. The box held a desk photo frame, a coffee mug, and a potted succulent sitting on a pile of manila folders.
The man gave an address in Mount Washington and didn’t crack the window. Raheem drove the route without talking. The man stared out the side window. At a red light on Falls Road, Raheem saw the man’s hands in the mirror. They were shaking with the fine oscillation of low blood sugar, the motor control starting to go.
First week.
Maybe second.
The man didn’t know yet.
At the dropoff, the passenger pulled out his wallet and counted bills. Ten dollars on a fifteen-dollar fare. He folded the wallet and put it back in his jacket. His last cash. Raheem watched the man walk toward the house. His steps were steady but forced. His hands trembled at his sides, and Raheem knew that in two weeks, or maybe three, the acetone smell would start, first in his breath, then the sweat that clung to his clothes. The man would shower twice a day and blame the soap, convince himself Dr. Bronner’s was all marketing, no substance, and his wife would open windows without knowing why.
Raheem’s spray bottle sat in the cup holder, half full. He picked it up and set it down again.
He couldn’t sell it to the man. He couldn’t explain it. There was no way to say “your body is about to betray you in a way your neighbors will detect before you do” to a man still holding a desk photo in a cardboard box.
His phone buzzed. Another ping. Bolton Hill.
Raheem pulled away from the curb and left the spray bottle where it was.
“Most of my working life has been spent near war without being in it, first writing for the Army and now working alongside Afghan and Iraqi allies who built new lives here. ‘Below 4.5’ comes from that side of it, where the effects show up in paperwork, new homes, community meetings, and the front seat of a car.” —Matthew Marcellus
Matthew Marcellus is a U.S. Army veteran who served as a public affairs NCO and photojournalist in Texas, Maryland, Germany, and South Korea. He directs communications for No One Left Behind, which advocates for Afghan and Iraqi allies of U.S. forces, and lives in Baltimore. “Below 4.5” is his first published fiction.
